Senator Barack Obama supported filibustering President Bush’s judicial nominees, but President Obama wants an up-or-down vote on health care. Tell you, what, Mr. President, we’ll consider that offer, once you make sure that every single one of W’s nominees to the federal bench (who would have been confirmed had the Senate voted on his nomination at the time of the appointment) is confirmed.

Oh, and, you’ll, um, need a health care bill that can garner a majority in both houses of Congress.

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Well it just depends on what side of the power spectrum you are on, Democrats liked the filibuster when they needed it just like Republicans liked using Reconciliation when they needed it. Politics work best when everyone forgets what happened the prior election cycle.

When Tennessee Senator Lamar Alexander opened the Republican response to President Obama’s remarks at yesterday’s health care summit, he asked Democrats to renounce the idea of using parliamentary maneuvers such as reconciliation to pass health care with a simple majority vote.

Mr. Obama tried to swat him down by claiming Americans wanted a straight up-or-down vote on his health care bill and don’t care about what methods are used to get it. “You know, this issue of reconciliation has been brought up. Again I think the American people aren’t always all that interested in procedures inside the Senate. I do think they want a vote on how we’re going to move this forward,” he told the 40-plus summit participants.

The only problem is the latest polls provide no support for his position. A new Gallup Poll finds that, by 52% to 39%, those surveyed oppose attempts by Democrats to circumvent a filibuster by passing health care by a simple majority vote. A separate poll by CNN found that only 25% of voters want Congress to pass a bill similar to the ones already voted on by the House and Senate. A full 48% want Congress to start over, and 25% want lawmakers to stop working on health care altogether.

That voters don’t understand “procedures inside the Senate” is also belied by the election of Scott Brown in Massachusetts, who attracted even Democrats to vote for him by promising to be the 41st vote to uphold a Senate filibuster of ObamaCare.

Vice President Joe Biden thought he was doing his boss a favor during the summit when he shot down Republican arguments about the public’s opposition to ObamaCare, but he wound up sounding like a critic of Mr. Obama’s own lecture to Republicans. “I’m always reluctant after being here 37 years to tell people what the American people think. I think it requires a little bit of humility to be able to know what the American people think,” Mr. Biden told the meeting.

Of course, there is some evidence beyond public opinion polls that the public is upset about the Democratic health care bills. Voters in Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts — states that represent almost a tenth of the nation’s population — have all held statewide elections in the last three months that were won by staunch opponents of ObamaCare.

I wish the public education system would have done a better job explaining to our young people why we have a Senate and why a filibuster is part of thier rules. Why do we even have two houses of congress? Most Americans who attended the public school system are ignorant about the Electoral College, and our government.
We are not a democracy. If so blacks and women might still not have the vote. Our founding fathers did not want a govenment controlled by the tyranny of the majority.
THe House tends to be the branch of the Congress that immediately takes up the hot issues. Because of rules such as the filibuster, in the Senate a few people can slow down the process and cause adults to pause and ponder what they are about to do. After all if any major legislation can’t get 218 votes in the House and 60 votes out of 100 in the Senate, should it really be the law of the land? When Democrats blocked judicial nominees of the Bush 43 administration, I didn’t like it. But I also didn’t want the Republicans to change the rules. You never know when you are going to be in the minority.